Ant is open a source technology from Apache project. You can have Ant jar file and build jar, war, ear files and you can deploy them in the application server.
For more infn you can go to jakarta.apache.org

It is a java-centric build tool, kinda like make, but it is written in java and doesn't have as many dependencies on external programs as make does. It's not as powerful, but it's easier to get up and running with.

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